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Monica Potts F or Republican supporters of Mitt Romney in Denver—site of Romney’s triumph in the first debate over the president two weeks ago—Tuesday night’s town hall was marked with energized anticipation. Romney had rescued them from a lackluster summer, and they were ready to celebrate even before moderator Candy Crowley introduced her first Town Hall participant. Around 50 people came to The Tavern downtown straight after work for a debate-watching party held by the Romney campaign. It began at 7 p.m. for those of us in Denver, which meant one thing to these voters: Happy Hour. Susan Rutherford and Brian Wong, friends who both work for a health-care company based here, sat in the middle of the bar eating appetizers across from a wall of seven flat-screen TVs, all turned to Fox News. Rutherford said the first debate had not only energized voters, but probably tilted more undecided voters into the Romney camp as well. “They saw more of the truth of who Romney is,” she says. “I...

The third Massachusetts Senate debate between Republican Senator Scott Brown and Democratic challenger Elizabeth Warren Wednesday night showed one thing: how good a debator any politician can be after three chances to say the same things. Unlike the last debate , the two candidates were unfailingly polite to each other. When Brown said that Warren's regulatory policies would hurt the middle class, Warren responded, "I'm glad you mentioned regulations!" (She then went on to mention that her support of regulations led to a new agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.) Brown complimented Warren on the creation of the CFPB (but then, of course, he mentioned that he was the deciding vote in the Dodd-Frank bill that created it.) The moderator, New England public television's Jim Madigan, apologized when he had to mention the candidates were out of time. The hullaboo came from the audience that—despite being told several times not to respond to their candidates—clapped or booed when...

The cable show Here Comes Honey Boo Boo opens with a shot of the Shannon-Thompson clan—the mom, June, stands in front of her small south Georgia house with her four daughters, Anna, Jessica, Lauryn, and Alana, and her boyfriend of eight years, Mike—interrupted by June farting. “Mama!” the girls scream. It serves as a good illustration of June’s philosophy as a mom. “I raise my girls to be who they are,” she says later on in the show. She repeats, often: “You like us or you don’t like us. We just don’t care.” Much of the chatter about the show has revolved around the challenge June throws down in the show's premiere: Like us or don’t. Plenty of critics are horrified; more can’t look away. It’s clear what the producers want viewers to think about the show: They assume that we’re going to sneer at it, at least a little bit. The tenth episode of Here Comes Honey Boo Boo ended the first half of its season last week, but the seven-year-old Alana was already a star before the show’s debut in...

What a ruckus! NBC's David Gregory hosted the second debate between Massachusetts Senate candidates, sitting Republican Scott Brown and his Democratic challenger, Elizabeth Warren. If you want to call the interruption derby that devolved before the University of Massachusetts at Lowell students' eyes a debate. Gregory opened by asking Warren about the well-worn Cherokee heritage controversy. Warren repeated what she's said before—including in the last debate, which Brown opened by attacking her on the same issue. (Full disclosure: Warren's daughter, Amelia Warren Tyagi, is a member of The American Prospect ’s board of directors and is chair of the board of the magazine’s publishing partner, Demos.) Gregory devoted many minutes of the debate to the issue, which began when the Boston Herald reported that Harvard University had claimed Warren as a minority on forms to counteract claims that its faculty wasn't diverse enough. Brown wants to use it to cast doubt on the entire biography...

On Thursday evening, Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic challenger in the Massachusetts Senate race, dusted off the debate skills that, in high school, won her a scholarship to George Washington University. Scott Brown, the Republican she wants to replace, raced from a Senate session in Washington, D.C., and polished up his Massachusetts accent—as if, after every line, he were going to pat some working Joe on the back with an “Amirite?” Brown began the night with opening comments needling Warren about the Cherokee “controversy.” (Full disclosure: Amelia Warren Tyagi, Elizabeth Warren's daughter, is chair of The American Prospect ’s board of directors and is chair of the board of the magazine’s publishing partner, Demos.) The claim is that, at some point in her career, she checked off a box to identify herself as a Native American. “Clearly she’s not,” he said. How will we know if it affected her acceptance to law school or her hiring as a professor at Harvard? Only if she releases all...